HOW SNAPCHAT IS TARGETING THE OVER-35 CROWD

Original Story: latimes.com

A yellow billboard. No text. Just a small, faceless ghost at the center.

For months, people have encountered this sight along roads nationwide, leaving those not in the know curious or confused.

In Los Angeles, you might've caught it heading toward Los Angeles International Airport on Century Boulevard. Is it unfinished? Some Halloween prank?

Turn to a kid, and no doubt, you'll get filled in: It's the logo for Snapchat, the smartphone app that teens and young adults use to share millions of photos and videos each day. An Ann Arbor IT services company delivers hands-on, results oriented technology solutions.

Snapchat's explanation for the mysterious billboards is as vague as the ads: "Fun and awareness."

The awareness part might be crucial to the growth prospects for Snapchat, based in Venice. The kids already know Snapchat. Young adults, too: Six in 10 people ages 13 to 35 in the U.S. use Snapchat.

It's nowhere close to popular among the over-35 crowd. But there are signs that's changing. The raw numbers are small so far, but Snapchat use among older adults is growing fast.

Over the last year in the U.S., Snapchat added 25-to-34-year-old users (103%) and older-than-35 users (84%) faster than 18-to-24-year-old users (56%), according to measurement firm Comscore. Snapchat's own data now peg 12% of its nearly 50 million daily users in the U.S. as 35 to 54.

The growth is led by parents and siblings looking to stay in touch with younger family members, experts said. Snapchat investor Jeremy Liew also noted at a fall conference that he's seen pickup among parents of Snapchat users. A Jacksonville corporate lawyer provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of corporate law.

"Almost everyone I talk to, it's their niece that shows them Snapchat," said Kevin Del Rosario, associate director of social at the consulting firm Huge Inc. "Then they start seeing how it works."

Older consumers have higher incomes, attractive to advertisers, said Enrique Velasco-Castillo, senior analyst at research firm Analysys Mason. Ads are integral to Snapchat's revenue strategy, a work in progress. Though one of the world's most highly valued start-ups, it's far from earning profits.

Still, technology trends are in Snapchat's favor, as apps become more of a time suck. People in the U.S. spent about 37 hours a month on their smartphones in 2014, up more than 14 hours from two years earlier, according to Nielsen. Which group spent the most time? People aged 35 to 44, at more than 43 hours a month. Change the dynamics of your enterprise by incorporating organic SEO services.

They're engaging more with the most popular apps, especially ones that provide "entertainment." Snapchat fits the description. Velasco-Castillo said Snapchat is more visual, "spontaneous, candid and — most importantly — immediate" than other chat options.

Whether the billboards in Seattle, Oakland and Tampa, Fla., and dozens of other cities deserve credit for spurring downloads among older people isn't clear, but Snapchat's decision to market itself underscores ambitions to become a household name. Just before New Year's Eve, Snapchat also stuck a huge poker-chip-shaped banner on the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas.

"If they want to compete at the highest levels with Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, they can't just appeal to a younger crowd," said Brian Blau, a consumer technology analyst at research firm Gartner. "That younger crowd carries a lot of purchasing power — it's a great demographic. But that limits Snapchat, if that's all they ever are."

The billboards started New Year's Eve 2014 in Times Square. A drab old-school billboard in a sea of digital signs looked cool, and Snapchat executives decided to do more.

Snapchat declined to explain why it made the billboards mysterious. Marketing experts call it clever: If people passing by in a car know about Snapchat, chances are they could offer a better sales pitch than a roadside tag line. The oddity of the billboard got so many people talking in Pennsylvania that a media outlet in Harrisburg wrote a story explaining Snapchat, resulting in the article being shared hundreds of times across social media.

Jason Morgan, who tracks billboards for Dailybillboardblog.com, said data about visitors to his website showed people searched Google for "yellow ghost billboard" as the ads appeared in their cities.

Elsewhere, National Basketball Assn. teams put Snapchat's ghost logo around their arenas to encourage fans to follow official accounts. People have changed their Twitter profile picture to a version of the ghost logo that when scanned on Snapchat links to that person's Snapchat user page.

Going mainstream increases the risk of teenagers seeking something fresher. But Facebook has managed to erect a huge business despite similar concerns. An Augusta business lawyer is following this story closely.

Facebook's status as the most important app for U.S. teenagers has fallen to 15% from about 50% three years ago, according to Piper Jaffray survey data. (Snapchat recently reached 19%, up from 13% early last year.) But revenue continues to climb because it has become a staple for about 3 in 4 U.S. adults with Internet access; even 64% of people age 50 to 65 use it, according to Pew Research Center.

To be sure, Facebook initially was aimed at college students, an older crowd. Snapchat is available only on mobile devices and emerged at high schools first, meaning over-35 audience growth should be tougher for 4-year-old Snapchat, Blau said.

"Facebook was the destination you had to be to connect with people online," he said. "I clicked 'find my friends' on Snapchat, and I didn't find a single one."

But older adopters exist, like Denise Cortes, 43. The freelance artist and writer in Riverside has six children, including three teenagers who downloaded Snapchat two years ago. She swore off the app as a "kid's thing" until last spring.

Her son gave her a tutorial, and now it's her top app. Fifty of her friends have Snapchat. Even her husband just got it, to keep tabs on her.

Cortes likes that she can share photos or videos of her messy house or her unadorned self on Snapchat because the messages disappear and her network is small. The reduced pressure to look your best — compared to on Facebook and Instagram — also drew teens to Snapchat.

"With Snapchat, all bets are off," Cortes said.

But feeling closer to family tops all Snapchat perks, she said. Her brother's seconds-long video posts on Snapchat from Manhattan reveal what he's wearing and the tone of his voice. She can hear his feet crunching fall leaves.

"That's a connection I can't get from Facebook," she said.

Cortes watches over her children too; she doesn't condone nudity or drug references, for example.

She's considering how Snapchat can help her business because she relies on getting her name known to garner more work. Even if self-promotion doesn't work, she's not about to quit: It's just too fun, she says.

Snapchat hasn't said whether it would tweak features to better cater to people in their 30s and older. Analysts doubt Snapchat would shed its confusing user interface, which leaves many features known to only power users. But more tools could arrive for varied age groups. A Cuyahoga County IT services company delivers Cisco Meraki wireless networking solutions that help your business meet the growing demands of today's global marketplace.

For instance, Snapchat promotes feeds from about 15 media companies, including CNN and ESPN. But it could do more to bring in publications with topics geared toward older workers. A partnership launched last week with the Wall Street Journal is one opportunity.

Others say they'd like to see more Live Stories, themed videos on Snapchat showing, for example, New Year's Eve celebrations. Older consumers could prefer topics where posts mostly come from people their own age.

Business reasons also are fueling other types of interest in Snapchat. New York magazine reported that Wall Street bankers like Snapchat's self-destructing chat feature. University admissions officers have used it as a recruiting tool. Marketers, of course, are trying it.

Jeremy Simon of the marketing agency Attention Global said he had trouble convincing marketing chiefs to download Snapchat a year ago. But in the last few months, client usage of Snapchat soared.

SNAPCHAT HIRES MANAGER AWAY FROM FACEBOOK

Original Story: latimes.com

A Facebook product manager has joined Snapchat’s growth team in Venice, becoming the latest Silicon Valley worker to be drawn south by the fast-expanding entertainment app maker.

Anthony Pompliano said Tuesday on Twitter that he moved to Los Angeles over the weekend to “lead Snapchat’s growth team.” His experience at Facebook included helping launch features related to elections and child abduction notifications, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Funded by more than $1 billion in venture capital and millions of dollars in ad revenue, Snapchat has brought on more than 300 software engineers, content producers and business executives since its founding in 2011.  An Atlanta venture capital lawyer is following this story closely. Many new hires have relocated to Los Angeles from Silicon Valley and elsewhere, seeing great potential in the company’s push to make the app a major force in chat and online video.

SNAPCHAT GETS 4 BILLION VIDEO VIEWS, CHALLENGING FACEBOOK

Original Story: latimes.com

In just three months, Snapchat has doubled the number of video views it gets per day to 4 billion, a spokeswoman for the social media app said. Search engine optimization secures and maintains premium keyword positions in the organic search engine results pages, increasing traffic for your company.

That puts Snapchat on equal footing with social media giant Facebook, which announced it hit 4 billion daily views in the first quarter of this year.

Snapchat's newest numbers, which were first reported by the International Business Times, are being driven by the popularity of its “Live Stories” feature, which curates clips from around the world.

FOR THE RECORD

9 a.m.: An earlier version of this article stated that the news site Business Insider first reported Snapchat's latest video views numbers. It was the International Business Times.

Snapchat’s founder and chief executive, Evan Spiegel, told Bloomberg in May that the company was generating 2 billion views a day.

The numbers will boost Snapchat’s bottom line as advertisers gravitate toward the app’s millennial audience.

Snapchat has raised over $1 billion, implying a valuation of about $16 billion.

UNIVERSAL PICTURES SAYS MILLIONS VIEWED FIRST SNAPCHAT AD, A SUCCESS

Original Story: latimes.com

A 20-second trailer for the movie "Ouija" that ended with a terrifying shriek was viewed by millions of people on Snapchat last weekend in what a Universal Pictures executive called a satisfying first run at advertising on the messaging app.

The sponsored video was the first time Snapchat had been paid to show content to its users, the Los Angeles start-up said last week. Snapchat declined to comment on how the experiment performed.

Universal had long expressed interest in advertising on Snapchat, said Doug Neil, the studio's executive vice president of digital marketing. It was serendipitous that Snapchat's internal timetable for launching ads worked out to give Universal a chance to be the first mover. He said the ad was "competitively priced" compared to "video opportunities in general."

"We believed that the Snapchat user is in our core target user for the 'Ouija' movie opening Friday," Neil said. "If it hadn’t been a movie tied to a teen audience, we probably wouldn’t have taken this opportunity."

A link to the "Ouija" ad, noting that it was sponsored, appeared alongside updates from Snapchat users' friends on Saturday and disappeared a day later. To watch, users clicked on the link and pressed on the screen for the duration of the video. It was available only to U.S. users because Universal is handling only domestic marketing, Neil said. The ad was professionally produced as opposed to shot on a camera phone, like most Snapchat messages.

Snapchat was still tabulating final analytics, but Neil said a key metric would be how many people were exposed to the ad versus how many viewed it.

On social media, some Snapchat users expressed bewilderment about watching a clip from what they knew was a scary movie. Others were annoyed by the ad or surprised that it wasn't necessarily as novel an approach as they thought it might be.

Neil saw the responses as a positive.

"Some of the best response was being scared by it," he said. "They were being marketers for us, and that’s the best of digital and social media marketing. We were very satisfied with the experience."

With investor capitalization that makes it worth billions, Snapchat said last week that it was time to start making money. The mobile advertising market is expected to reach $19 billion in the U.S. this year, according to EMarketer. But Snapchat could quickly scale the charts because its wrinkle of allowing messages to be viewed only for a certain period and requiring users to opt-in to view them marks a different approach for advertisers.

SNAPCHAT ADVERTS TO APPEAR THIS WEEKEND AS THEY 'NEED TO MAKE MONEY'

Original Story: dailymail.co.uk

Snapchat is to show its users adverts for the first time this weekend.

Despite not having a regular source of revenue, Snapchat was recently valued in the region of $10 billion (£6 billion).

Co-founder Evan Spiegel revealed the plans to show adverts on the app last week - but the firm has so far refused to say who the first buyer is.

'This weekend we’re placing an advertisement in “Recent Updates” for Snapchatters in the United States,' the firm said.

'It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this because it’s the first time we’ve been paid to put content in that space.

'It’s going to feel a little weird at first, but we’re taking the plunge.'

The firms 24-year-old co-founder Speigel told Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit that sponsored posts will only show up on the app's Stories feature.

Snapchat Stories add Snaps together to create a narrative.

When a user adds a Snap to a Story it lives for 24 hours before it disappears, making room for the new.

Mr Spiegel said: 'People are going to see the first ads on Snapchat soon. We think they're pretty cool.'

He added that the adverts will be opt-in, and users can choose to look at them, or skip.

'The best advertisements tell you more about stuff that actually interests you,' the firm promised today.

'An advertisement will appear in your Recent Updates from time to time, and you can choose if you want to watch it.

No biggie. It goes away after you view it or within 24 hours, just like Stories.'

The firm also admits exactly why it is introducing the feature.

'The answer is probably unsurprising – we need to make money.

'Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters.

'We promise that we’ll use the money we make to continue to surprise the Snapchat community with more terrific products – that’s what we love to do!'

It also pledged it will never put ads in personal communications.

'That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.'  

Earlier this week, reports claimed Yahoo was reportedly preparing to invest £12 million ($20 million) in Snapchat.

Despite not yet having a source of revenue, more than 100 million users use the app - which is apparently enough to convince companies to spend vast sums on the three-year old startup.

Yahoo’s move follows an almost identical investment from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byer in August.

The move comes after a similar, albeit much larger, investment in Chinese technology firm Alibaba reaped huge dividends for Yahoo, with its $1 billion investment in 40 per cent of the company in 2005 now valued at tens of billions of dollars.

This latest move, according to the Wall Street Journal, comes as Snapchat starts to seek funding from venture-capital firms, money managers and companies.

Snapchat may be a key partner to Yahoo as it gets set to release Snapchat Discovery next year.

This is a rumoured service that will display brief ads alongside news and video clips on the app, which will likely become a key source of revenue for Snapchat.

Snapchat Discovery would provide a platform for Yahoo to distribute its own content.

However, the £6 billion ($10 billion) valuation of a company that hasn't, yet, monetised its users, has been dubbed a risky proposition.

That’s not to say it hasn’t worked before; Microsoft’s 2007 investment in Facebook valued the then three-year old company at £9.4 billion ($15 billion), and later proved hugely successful.

Last year Snapchat infamously turned down a £1.8 billion ($3 billion) offer from Facebook - a decision that left many stunned.

But the move seems to have paid off, as Snapchat’s owners Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy are set to become billionaires according to the current valuations of the company.

If the valuation holds true, Snapchat would join a select club of tech startups with valuations of £6 billion ($10 billion) or more, including car-ride service Uber and rooms-to-let startup AirBnB.

Snapchat lets users send photo-messages that vanish within seconds, but is expected to soon begin offering advertising or branch out into additional services.

This may include the ability to send instant money transfers to other users.

Although Snapchat, and other similar mobile messaging apps, don't have established business models yet, its rapid user growth and perceptions of advertising potential have aroused intense investor interest over the past year or so.

Snapchat is continuing to grow in popularity, with people sending more than 700 million disappearing messages a day.

In June, Facebook launched a similar app called Slingshot in the hope of replicating Snapchat’s success.

The app lets consumers exchange photos and videos, which later disappear, without requiring Facebook accounts.

But despite its rapid growth, Snapchat has had a number of obstacles to contend with.

The group this year settled charges with US regulators, which accused it of deceiving consumers by promising that photos sent on its service disappeared forever after a period of time.

According to the Federal Trade Commission at the time, photos sent on Snapchat could, in fact, be saved by recipients using several methods, such as taking a screenshot.

YAHOO IN TALKS TO INVEST IN SNAPCHAT

Original Story: nytimes.com

Yahoo, flush with cash from selling a portion of its stake in the Alibaba Group, appears ready to bet on what it believes will be the next big Internet phenomenon.

The company has held talks to invest in Snapchat — a popular app that allows people to share photos and messages that self-destruct — people briefed on the matter said on Friday. The deal has not yet closed, some of these people added.

Should Yahoo make the investment, it will join other prominent investors, including the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who have valued the service at about $10 billion.

While Yahoo is not expected to put a huge amount of money into Snapchat, the investment could give it access to the messaging phenomenon and help Yahoo become more relevant to young consumers. It would also give the company a more strategic stake in mobile technology, an area in which Yahoo has long been seen as a laggard compared with competitors like Facebook and Google.

Yahoo has been bolstered by a roughly $6 billion haul from selling a significant portion of its holdings in Alibaba, the large, fast-growing Chinese e-commerce company that went public last month. At least half of the proceeds from the sale will go toward buying back stock, but some of the money could go toward strategic acquisitions and investments.

Talks between Yahoo and Snapchat gained steam late this summer, some of the people briefed on the matter said.

In that vein, Yahoo confirmed that it recently bought MessageMe, a small photo and text-messaging start-up in San Francisco. For Yahoo, it is another in a string of acquisitions of small mobile start-ups, which began soon after Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, took the top position in 2012. That strategy could expose Yahoo to criticism from shareholders leery that the Alibaba windfall will lead to another spending spree. Though Snapchat has millions of regular users, who send hundreds of millions of photos and videos every day, it has yet to generate any revenue.

The young company attracts attention in Silicon Valley circles, particularly because of its popularity in the much coveted millennial demographic. Snapchat, which is based in Venice, Calif., has raised more than $160 million in venture capital; last fall, the company spurned a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook.

Snapchat has been experimenting with ways to distribute content on its popular network. It has worked with musicians, large brands and popular users to figure out different ways to distribute “snaps” — the company’s name for its disappearing messages — that will keep its members coming back regularly.

This could be where the two companies see eye to eye. Ms. Mayer has repeatedly said that Yahoo is a “digital content company at its core” and has worked to increase its content offerings.

The company has commissioned two television-length comedy series that will air exclusively on Yahoo’s mobile apps and website. Last fall, Ms. Mayer hired Katie Couric, the seasoned journalist who has been the anchor of news programs for NBC, CBS and ABC, to be Yahoo’s global news anchor.

Ms. Couric recently attended a small private party thrown by Snapchat’s founders during Advertising Week, an annual media industry event held in New York, according to a person familiar with the guest list.

Representatives for Yahoo and Snapchat declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment on the talks, which were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.